Friday, 16 July 2010

For I dance And drink, and sing, Till some blind hand Shall brush my wing.

If thought is life And strength and breath And the want Of thought is death;

Then am I A happy fly, If I live, Or if I die.

William Blake: The Fly, from Songs of Experience, 1794William Blake: from The Song of Los, 1795, relief etching with colour printing and hand colouring: upper image from Copy A, British Museum, London; lower image from Copy E, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, Ca.(images via the William Blake Archive)

Didn't his brother Robert visited him after death and brought him the technique?

I've just spent the past month reading the prophetic books in "Erdman" order (which mean I should have "bifurcated" over to the the unengraved ones (Tiriel, Vala, etc) before tackling Milton and Jerusalem, if I wanted to stay chronological, but I didn't, I was too far in before it occurred to me)> I never realized before quite how methodical his "cottage craziness" was. Now that I've finished Milton, I'm about to begin either Jerusalem of Vala, or the Four Zoas, now that it's occurred to me to bifurcate ... any opinion which is better read first?

Speaking of Milton, did any *other* poet ever become such an otherworldly epic hero of another poet's poem? All I can think of is Virgil in Dante, but he's not transformed nearly as far as Milton is ...

Ah, one of those great confluences of coincidence . . . I love it when that happens.

First, to John B-R -- I'd read The Four Zoas before Milton and Jerusalem, if only to get the basics of his entire cosmological mythos down. It has some of the most gorgeous poetry he ever wrote in Book IX.

Tom -- as it happens, I spent a good part of yesterday re-reading Northrop Frye's Fearful Symmetry, which I'm pleased to report still holds up after all these years. I know this threatens to become a fairly large comment, but I have to quote a bit of it here. He's talking about Enion, an "emanation" of one of the four Zoas:

"She knows only that she can never be comforted as long as pain exists, and that she will not cease to be a wandering and mourning spirit until nature has become again the 'happy garden-state' it once was . . . She is the 'vain shadow of hope' which finds everything short of a complete apocalypse hopeless. She is the part of our minds which dimly realizes that all pleasure is at least partly a dream under an anesthetic. Something is always suffering horribly somewhere, and we can only find pleasure by ignoring that fact. We must ignore it up to a point, or go mad: but in the abyss of consciousness to which Enion has been banished, there lurks the feeling that joy is based on exclusion, that the Yule log can blaze cheerfully only when the freezing beggars in the streets are, for the moment, left to freeze. It is a terrible song that Enion sings . . ."

Whew!

I got back into Blake this summer because of the tribute to Jack Clarke Mike Boughn is collecting, a project to which several people who visit this blog might be contributing. Besides his ekphrasis, it's always been important for me to remember that he was buddies with Tom Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft, and stayed radical until the end . . .

Thanks for noticing. Your great eye always honours what it falls upon.

Blake and his wife printed six sets of the Song of Los engravings, each copper plate then hand-coloured by Blake uniquely. Five of these sets survive. The Library of Congress has a good set. The British Museum set has brighter colours. The upper image here is from that set. But the most deep and rich colours, in what appears to be perhaps a culmination, is the Huntington Library set. The lower image here is from that set. You can see Blake has not only painted "wet" over the plate, but drawn on it with an engraving tool. You can feel him putting into it everything at his disposal.

Thanks for reply to question of "prompts" -- yes, how interesting, the "ekphrastic element" (don't we usually think the 'illustrations' came AFTER the poems?) plus the "fluency achieved by his technique" (nice thought) which he 'invented' of course, perhaps some resonance here ---

7.17

grey whiteness of fog against invisibleridge, red-tailed hawk calling in rightforeground, no sound of wave in channel

The Song of Los is a sort of mini-prophetic book, one of the Prophecies of the Continents, and while the best of it, Africa, is intelligible enough to anyone familiar with Blake's endless rantings against abstraction and organized religion as sources of all evil, it's still a bit hard to swallow qua poem.

The engravings for it were done in the same year Blake did his graphic work for the Songs of Experience, and the design for the Fly therein is more conventional illustration that original conception, as was the case with the Song of Los images.

Flashes of a young boy in the background selling balloons and inflated cartoons in the middle of the highway dodging the cars and the bright din, bare footed each 6:00 pm, knocking window panes for people oblivious to a possibility of innocence in his eyes.

So much poverty. It follows me through subway cars.Poverty to die a death within one's own family.Poverty of the darkness across the ice. Poverty of cataract eyes.Poverty of young men alone behind the stairway, who practicealchemy inside bottle caps, who knowthe altruism of last syringe.

-JC.

Moving on, there is an old tattered man crouched on his knees eating an ice cream outside a mega-plaza claiming happiness.

Coincidentally, in Jim's last work, the novel The Petting Zoo (which will be out in November), there is a passage in which the protagonist, a successful artist picked up for having visions in the city, is briefly confined under observation in a psychiatric ward. On the hallway floor he discovers a copy of Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:

"It was an annotated volume with beautiful miniature reproductions of Blake's illustrations. Billy loved Blake's poems, and Blake's paintings always left him with an abstrusely pure joy..."

Confluences, indeed ... just posted Blake's "Auguries of Innocence" in an unrelated context (The Doors "End of the Night") and, somehow, I see the workmanlike approach, the catalogue of elements supporting the basic thesis, as the connection between Seeger and Blake. "If I had a Hammer" particularly uses this technique but beyond that there seems to be a relation to the working man in both these artists, somehow their hands are so important. With Blake the visual work feeds the written and vice versa.

I always felt that Pete, when done on stage, was ready to go help you work on the roof.

In sum, I feel your thoughts on ekphrasis may actually provide a common thread.

The non-stop heat and humidity in the east really makes it difficult to think a lot of the time. Waking up ahead of the heat and reading through The Fly, the comments and the poetry here is really uplifting and refreshing. When it cools down, I'm going to be looking at a lot more Blake.

The feel of something made by hand has been largely lost. Blake, we remember, not only did his own engraving work but made some 500 engravings for other people.

The feeling of the hand close to the grain, whether with the grain or against it, is induplicable.

(Currently intensely aware of the significance of the hand as a right thumb tumour prevents me using that stubborn opposable digit, which I am now concluding may be more useful than the brain when it comes to getting things done. And if only Pete Seeger and William Blake were here to lend a hand with the badly needed roof and eave work...)